VibeGame: Exploring Vibe Coding Games

The Problem

People are trying to vibe code games. And it kind of works, at first. However, as the project grows, things begin to fall apart. Why? And what can we do about it?

I'll talk about the problem, how I fixed it, and where to go from here.

What Is "Vibe Coding"?

First, what is vibe coding? It's originally coined by Andrej Karpathy in a viral tweet where it's defined as where you "fully give in to the vibes, embrace exponentials and forget the code even exists".

However, since then, it's used descriptively to mean a lot of different things, anywhere from just "using AI when coding" to "not thinking about the code at all". In this blog post, I'll define it as: using AI as a high-level programming language to build something. Like other programming languages, this benefits from understanding what's going on under the hood, but doesn't necessarily require it.

With this interpretation, you could make a game without understanding code, though knowing the fundamentals still helps.

Context Management

Earlier I mentioned that "as the project grows, things begin to fall apart". This is because there is evidence that as the context window fills up, model performance begins to degrade. This is especially true for game development, where the context can grow very large, very quickly.

To address this issue, there are many personal ad-hoc solutions, such as writing LLM-specific context directly in the project files, or more comprehensive solutions like Claude Code Development Kit for large-scale context management.

I couldn't find a lightweight, accessible solution, which doesn't rely on significant domain knowledge. So I made one: 🧅 Shallot, a simple, lightweight, unopinionated context management system for Claude Code. It relies on two basic commands:

1. /peel [prompt] to load context at the beginning of a conversation
2. /nourish to update context at the end of a conversation

Initial Exploration

Here's how it went:

Attempt 1: Roblox MCP

Pros:

Cons:

Attempt 2: Unity MCP

Pros:

Cons:

Pros:

Cons:

Yes.